Burnt offerings

‘memory marina’ – today, last night’s dream

I bought fish sandwiches from a vendor on the jetty, his food shielded from the downpour by thick sheets of plastic, and we ate them sombrely while listening to the rain falling on our hoods. Green humid scents blossomed from the blue tinted docks, wood swelling, hulls bumping, gentle bells ringing at spaced intervals. It was a miserable location that filled your heart with wonder. The Germans have a word for ‘melancholic longing’, but I’ve long since forgotten it.The smell of that place is what stands out most. Not the pungent fish-stench you’d expect, but a deep royal blue scent. Hidden in that smell which poured from some gully in the recesses of my unconscious mind were the traces of every memory, like a fractal phantom odour. I recall it rising up from amidst the maelstrom of oceanic debris, so clustered you couldn’t even see the water. Bamboo poles clattered and rose among barnacled yacht hulls and floating blue plastic tubs. Discarded cans and lengths of rubber hosing twisted and foamed amidst caught netting.The dull patter of rain against the hood I wore seemed ceaseless, as if the audio event was the flicker of silence in between liquid impacts rather than the rainfall itself.There was a very real sense that this place was both forsaken and eternal. It had been left to amass haphazardly, this miasma of marine-detritus, and yet in that smell, that deep blue scent, I knew this place would endure long after many others had melted into the waking ephemeral.